Although I can recite chapter and verse from the original series, I’m not real sharp on any of the others.
I saw a TNG episode that dealt with the crew taking an admiral on board to salvage a lost ship – a ship that he had commanded, and on which Riker served as an ensign.
It turns out that this ship was testing a cloaking device, in violation of a Federation/Romulan treaty – and that years ago, some of the officers had mutinied. Riker stayed on the then-captain’s side, and kept mum about the illegal device.
Ultimately, Picard gets wind of what went on, the admiral tries to assume command, and no one will follow his orders. Picard blows the whistle, escapes, and orders the admiral arrested.
Riker then nobly says, “Sir, you should have me arrested as well,” and Picard does so.
My question: was the resolution of this arrest ever covered in another episode? And if so, what happened?
Nope. The Pegasus remains one of the many unresolved episodes. I’ve written some fan fiction that touches on it, but aside from that, the Trek writers seemed surprisingly incapable of dealing with repercussions of any kind. Even that Warp-5 speed limit, which should have been a HUGE turning point for the series, was referred to only once or twice in passing and ultimately forgotten.
Individually, the characters have received reprimands along the way. These also have no lasting effect. And that’s not even getting into techno-babble plot devices like transporters used to turn people into adolescents. This lack of consequence means one could argue that TNG had continuing characters, but not a continuing situation, as it were.
Or using the transporters to make duplicates of people out of nothing. Or using the transporter to bring someone back from the dead. Or using the transporter to combine two people into one being (don’t ask where the excess matter goes). Or using the trasnporter to cure any disease (except diseases with Crucial Plot-Point Shields).
And let’s not even get into the number of uses for the holodeck…
What I mean is, they’re always overloading the damn thing with too much power when they try some weird energy transfer or special attack or whatever plot device du jour. And yet the crew always has a hard time the next time they need to do something similar. Starfleet ought to take some of the juryrigged ideas and design some better hardware. But then I suppose the writers would just come up with some similar yet somehow totally unrelated situation that completely invalidates the earlier solution because of, uh, the inverse phase modulation of the gravimetric distortion field.
Sure - in fact, it always kinda bugged me that Starfleet got, via Kirk and Spock’s efforts (The Enterprise Incident) a cloaking device, but were completely unable to make use of it when it was “legal” for them to do so. It’s unclear to me when this treaty outlawing cloaking technology was signed, but what are the odds that the Federation, when in possession of an actual cloaking device, that the Enterprise herself had used sucessfully, was unable to develop the technology?
Now I’ll hijack my own thread:
Where can I get a copy of the DS9 episode that inserted DS9 characters into the “Trouble With Tribbles” TOS episode?